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So, generally we post about design stuff on here, but occasionally something else brilliant comes across our path that we can't help but share, and that happened last night when we caught the fantastic new play If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet at the Bush Theatre:

"Surviving school as a fat kid is tough enough. When your Mum's a teacher, it's hell. What's more, Anna's Dad is obsessed with saving the world and her maverick uncle Terry is dossing on the couch."

The play is the first outing from 26 year old writer Nick Payne, and is a fantastically nuanced piece, striking a perfect balance between comedy and tragedy, particularly in the character of uncle Terry, brilliantly played by the captivating Rafe Spall (in fact, it's a bit unfair singling him out, as the entire cast is spot on). The direction, by the Bush's Artistic Director Josie Rourke, steers well clear of the subject's potential for melodrama, and kept us gripped throughout.

We've just got our new set of stationery back from the printer, and are dead happy with it. It's been printed by the lovely folks over at Benwells. The business card is a matt silver foil on Kapok - a 100% recycled 500gsm kraft board from the wonderful gang at Fenner Paper - while the comp slips and letterhead are on Episode IV, another recycled stock from Fenner. (And hey - check out the blog Justin at Fenner is running - it's ace.)

Grafik (the UK based graphic design magazine) has just launched its website, beautifully and elegantly designed by our studio-mates Fitzroy and Finn. The site is divided up into a blog, a talent section, a profile section, and an archive of all the old issues.

'Can Graphic Design be considered Art?' It's one of those questions that comes up time and again, and one of those questions to which the quick glib answer is as good as any 10,000 word thesis response: 'Yeah, sure, if you want it to be'.

But the intersection between design and art can be an interesting place to hang out, and we were reminded of this over the weekend, when we checked out the new Ed Ruscha and Sophie Calle shows that opened in town recently. Both artists create work that plays with text extensively, though in very distinct ways.

The retrospective of American artist Ed Ruscha (pronounced Rew-shay fact-fans) is at the Hayward. Ruscha actually studied as a graphic designer at Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts), and his first job was as a layout artist at an advertising agency.

His career has spanned fifty years, and has constantly shown a preoccupation with typography and lettering, often in an almost abstract sense, using words for their forms rather than their meaning; although in the 80s his work started to use longer sentences, set in his own typeface, Boy Scout Utility Modern (which looks like a buggered-up version of Wim Crouwel's Gridnik).

The show features work from right across Ruscha's career but, apart from the first room, it left us feeling a little flat...

In contrast, Sophie Calle's show Talking to Strangers, at the Whitechapel Gallery, left us feeling excited and energised. We've loved her work since seeing her fantastic show Double Game at Camden Arts Centre back in 1999 - check out the disgustingly gorgeous book of the same name that Vince Frost designed for her - you'll find it on his site under Discipline > Book Design. (And heck, you can still pick up used copies of Double Game
on Amazon.)

The main installation at the Whitechapel show is Take Care of Yourself, first shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The work is based on a break-up email sent to her by an ex-lover. Calle sent the email on to 107 women (including judges, lawyers, ballerinas, actresses, her mum...) and asked them to interpret it. She then documented the results in utterly beautiful pieces that combine photographs of the women and typographic representations of their repsonses (as well as in a few short film pieces). Suitably for a work based on written communication, the installation feels a bit like walking through a book. It's really great, and well worth a visit.

Physical letterforms... just delicious. We've spotted a spate of new ones available to buy around town lately. The ones above are from the newly opened Anthropologie store on Regent St. (They only have a limited UK website so far, but you can check out their full range on the USA site.) The zinc letters come in two sizes, the 8" set above, and a huge set that stand 25" tall - as with the ampersand below.

Just round the corner from there, at Do Shop (on Beak Street), we saw these set of Metalvetica letters from Seletti, which each stand around 35cm high, and as with the Anthropologie set have holes in the back for hanging on walls. They're weighted too, so will sit happily on a shelf.

And at the same store, you can also pick up ceramic Clarendon letterforms in black or white, also from Seletti, which stand about 25cm tall.

What's the betting these are just all over the design blogs today? The pictograms for London 2012 have just been unveiled, and they're the work of design studio Someone.

They've been created in two versions, a silhouette (above) and a 'dynamic' version (below) designed to 'bring the representations to life' for use on merchandise, posters and sign-posts: which makes you wonder what the silhouette version is supposed to be doing in the first place. The dynamic versions are inspired by the London Underground map apparently.

Here are the pictograms from Beijing, set to the same grid - interesting to see the 2012 set have far more cycling versions (including this year's special bonus BMX discipline), as well as a couple more equestrian ones.

We reckon the acid test is whether you or not you can easily work out which discipline is which without relying on text. As well as that though there's the larger question of the overall aesthetic. Having to use a larger box for the modern pentathalon seems a bit wrong, and the sailing pictogram seems to have drifted in from somewhere else...

Illustrator Johanna Basford has been in touch to let us know about an interesting little project she's running over the next couple of days (Wednesday 14 & Thursday 15 October), called Twitter Picture.

She's going to create one of her rather beautiful hand-drawn illustrations, inspired entirely by suggestions from Twitter users (check out @johannabasford), and then do a limited edition of 100 silk-screened prints from the drawing.

Sounds like a smart way to get lots of people to check out her work, and could be an interesting snap-shot of what's going on in the collective consciousness right now...

We picked up this little number at the most recent Ephemera Society Fair. We've done (an admittedly cursory) google about it, but not turned up any useful info (if you can shed any light on it, drop us a line). But regardless, it's just great isn't it? We're loving the laying of type, made all the more special with the scratchy handwritten text. Ace. More stuff, as ever, on Alistair's Ephemera Flickr Set.